, soon after breakfast and prayers, a boy arrived
from Ta-ning with the unpleasant news that 500 soldiers, who were in
sympathy with the Boxers, had entered the city. The inhabitants at
once urged the ladies to flee to a more distant village, and, taking up
their Bibles, the missionaries started off quickly, with a native
Christian for their guide. Rain fell heavily, and they arrived at
their destination, Tong-men, wet to the skin. Food was given them, and
in the afternoon they lay down and slept in a shed full of straw. The
natives were determined, however, that they should have a better place
in which to pass the night, and prepared a cave for them, spreading
clean mats on the brick beds. But, late in the afternoon, a Christian,
whom the missionaries had sent to Ta-ning to obtain information
concerning the movements of the soldiers, returned with the pleasing
news that there were none in the city, nor had any been there.
Thankful that the alarm had been a false one, the three missionaries,
one feeling somewhat unwell, trudged back to the Muh-ien, and refreshed
themselves with tea. Throughout the day, or rather from breakfast
until their return after dark, they had drunk nothing, tea, strange to
say, being an unknown luxury in the place where they had sought
temporary shelter.

On the following day soldiers did enter Ta-ning, but as an official
despatch arrived almost at the same time instructing the yamen to
protect foreigners, the three ladies decided not to remove from
Muh-ien. This proclamation, a copy of which was brought to the
missionaries, stated that all foreigners who remained quietly at their
stations would be unmolested, and was a great improvement on the
previous one, which ordered that foreigners were to be exterminated.
The arrival of the allied forces had of course made the Chinese deem it
advisable to withdraw the former proclamation.

Nothing occurred during the next two days to make the missionaries
think that they were in immediate danger of being massacred. They
spent the time in reading, sewing and talking to the sympathetic people
who called on them. But on the third day they received the sad
information that seven of their missionary friends had been murdered on
July 16.

'Oh, it is sad, sad,' May Nathan wrote in her diary, 'such valuable
lives; and who will be the next? Perhaps we shall, for why should we
be spared when, for my own part, I know that the lives of those who
have gon